Our democracy emerged in full and open view. People could see and discuss matters, and challenge people on points of view in plain view. Anonymous was hard in a

Our democracy emerged in full and open view. People could see and discuss matters, and challenge people on points of view in plain view. Anonymous was hard in a crowd - mask? Hah hah. Printing was also more or less open to view as few people had printers in the letter press area. Full steam to 2021 - people can utter good and bad from a safe and anonymous hideout. The good is OK, but how can we deal with the bad? All the kids cyber harassed, the explosion of fake news buried in a flood of valid news - few people have the smarts and ability to analyze it and separate the valid from the fake. I see stuff I know is fake because it is within my technical and legal background - and I ignore it. Sadly we have all seen how total BS gets believed because it has a veneer of validity, even though it is fake. Once believed it is acted on. Get bitten by a rabid dog, and use some fake voodoo = you die anyway, yet we have a 100% vaccine against rabies when administered shortly after the bite. We are lucky that Covid is only 1-2% fatal to the average person, can you imagine if Covid was 100% fatal, like rabies is unvaccinated? Covid may well mutate to be 25% fatal - how will the antivaxxers fare in that situation? So this reaction by the Canadian Government looks like the start of accountability for online utterances. Verify or retract seems reasonable - perhaps it can stay posted, but be flagged as unverified or fake. I think he is going in the right direction and with tuning an acceptable set of rules will emerge. There will be a higher overhead cost to deal with this via paid staff - one wonders of this will be so costly that it will chill these media. How did the newspapers deal with this when it emerged at the dawn of print journalism back in the 1800's, before our current instant distribution? China seems to be going in the direction of full accountability by mandating full confirmed ID with address etc - a very strict rule only available to a few highly authoritarian states?